Can an Ex-Redmond Exec Save MySpace?

MySpace has been in the news almost every day lately, with high school kids
getting suspended for saying vicious and inappropriate things, a teacher in
trouble for sending messages to a student she is accused of having inappropriate
relations with, and a recent mass purging of offensive material.

Now a former Microsoft exec is coming to save the day. Hemanshu Nigam, who
developed child protection programs for the company, will drive
online safety for MySpace.

FrontPage, We Hardly Knew Ya FrontPage, which Microsoft bought a decade ago to get into the Web page
building business, never had the shine of tools from Macromedia and others,
and was never seen as hip by the trendy Web set. Microsoft is replacing
this single tool with three news ones: an app for building SharePoint sites,
a high-end tool aimed at Dreamweaver users, and one based on Visual Studio for
real geeks (being a geek is a good thing these days).

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Atlas CTP Shrugged This week brings a new
test rev of Atlas, a Microsoft-built tool for AJAX programmers.

With it developers can build apps that run on other platforms and non-IE browsers.
The tool is almost ready for prime time, and Microsoft says apps built with
the beta are good enough for production.

About the Author

Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.